playing with fire
by lastofthecrimelords
Summary: jim moriarty is waging war against the world, and as far as he sees it, there's little doubt who will win.


Disclaimer: I own neither Sherlock nor Adele's "Set Fire to the Rain". Please don't sue.

A/N: Okay…so…I've had this sitting on my computer for a while and I was too nervous to put it up. And right before I do, two stories appear on the site – one with a very similar line in it, one with a very similar theme in it. And now everyone's gonna think I plagiarised. I didn't. Can we leave it at that? Thank you.

A/N 2: Reposted (and hopefully improved) after some editing. Hope you enjoy!

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><p>"<em>So I set fire to the rain<br>And I threw us into the flames  
>Well, it burned while I cried because I heard it screaming out your name,<br>Your name…"_

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><p>Ever since Jim Moriarty can remember, he's had an obsession with fire.<p>

Perhaps calling it an "obsession" is going a bit far. Other people refer to it as an "issue", just another one of many "problems" that stop him from being "normal". _Problem…_he thinks that's going a little far, personally. He's never really considered it a problem; more of a relationship, long-term, open and ultimately damaging. And yet, it's one that he can't stand to break off. Jim is perfectly aware that in the long run he'll scorch himself if he doesn't give it up, but still the infatuation remains.

Years ago, before _everything else_ starts, Jim likes to crouch down in front of fires and just watch them until he's blinded, and his eyes feel like they will burn out of his skull and melt into the blaze. He hasn't really seen fire all that much. Admittedly, he lives in an area of town where boys in hoodies enjoy setting fire to dustbins and burning out old cars, but Jim already knows to keep away from them. Ever since some little kid got stabbed in an alleyway with a switchblade, there's been a hierarchy. Teenagers rule the streets, and everyone else has to keep their heads down so they don't get knocked off their shoulders. There are few people who dare to rebel against the system, and the ones who do tend to disappear mysteriously on dark nights and are rarely heard from again.

Jim is one of the rebels, but silently, in the hidden kind of way that is always the most dangerous, and he rejoices in his own secret anarchy. His rebellion isn't just against the gangs that rule the streets. It's against his grandmother _(for letting his father get on with life)_ and his father_ (for getting on with life) _and his mother _(for leaving)_ and Carl Powers _(for all the lies and taunts and twisted smiles and everysingleotherthing)_ and the school psychologist, Dr. Morgan _(for asking if any good can come out of his mother's departure)_ and everyone else he knows, not to mention quite a few people that he doesn't.

Jim Moriarty is waging war against the world, and as far as he sees it, there's precious little doubt who will win.

* * *

><p>The first time he sees flames, proper flames, is when he is seven years old. It's at a bonfire night, some shoddy little common with beaten-down grass, metal benches and crushed Coke cans littering the grass. But in the light of the fireworks exploding overhead in supernovas of silver and gold, the whole place is illuminated, like someone has come along and just sprayed glitter and glass over it all, turning a child's pencil drawing into some wild acid dream. All the little kids stare up at the sky with their mouths open, like it's snowing and they're waiting to catch the sparkling droplets falling from the clouds. Their faces are so white in the moonlight. It's like the end of the world, and they are all waiting for the sky to fall down and smash them all into pieces.<p>

Jim isn't looking at the fireworks, though. The only thing he is interested in is the bonfire over by the railings – that roaring orange monster that snarls and claws at itself way up above their heads. People are feeding it, branches and twigs and coal, and when it begins to subside they douse it with a clear liquid that stinks like car engines. Jim wants to scream at them to step away before they're swallowed up whole, but he doesn't, because he knows how to tame the beast, and he's the only one who can do it. So he goes and kneels by it and stares into its glowing, ruby-jewel caves.

As he watches, one collapses, the roof caving in; a rockslide. The creature hunches down, snarls. He reaches out one hand. Wanting to touch it. To appease it.

But then there are fingers on his shoulders and he is being dragged away backwards, and his mother is shouting at him, saying that he was leaning into the fire, that he would have burned his fingers off in another second or two. She shrieks that he's crazy, a mental case – just like his father. The moment those words sneak out of her mouth, she tries to catch hold of them and pull them back in, but it's no good; they've escaped and Jim knows exactly what they mean.

Two years later, she's gone – not dead, at least he doesn't think so. Just gone. Packed her bags, moved out, left, with a passport in her coat pocket and the scream of a car alarm fading in her ears. His father doesn't seem to care so much, and Jim feels no regret either – or so he tells himself. A crazy husband and a crazy son were just too much to cope with for an ordinary, sane, sensible woman. He doesn't blame her for taking the easy way out.

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><p>The first person Jim burns is Carl Powers.<p>

Though the murder is a mere footnote to the story of his life's mischief, it's one of the highlights. A murder is like a car wreck; you want to ignore it, but you simply can't, and in the end you find that ignoring it isn't really what you desire. Murder is exciting. It's loud and flamboyant, not like suicide – which is more of the quiet, slippery snuffing-out of a candle flame, leaving behind unfulfilled questions to which you can already guess the answer. In later years, Jim sometimes ruminates over what engraving he will have on his headstone. He's considered, "Died Laughing" and even "Died of Boredom", but always returns to his most creative endeavour: "Lived like a murder, died like a suicide".

(In the end, of course, it's all three of them, except there's no headstone.)

Carl Powers is always laughing, it seems. With his friends, during class, at lunchtimes, everywhere, always. Most of the time the laughter is directed at Jim. And it's always that kind that's the loudest.

It's easy enough to slip the poison into the boy's medication.

Later on that day, Jim sits on a bench by the edge of the swimming pool, bare feet wet, and dispassionately watches the thrashing form in the middle of the pool, bubbles trailing upwards to break the surface of the water, like a dolphin trapped in a tuna net. By the time a teacher notices, and the whistles start to blow and the other children start to scream, the bubbles have ceased. The gym teacher's attempt at mouth-to-mouth has no effect, and Carl Powers remains still and silent, a dripping dead weight, a slab of meat, until the ambulance arrives, all flashing cherry-red and blue. As usual, it's too late.

At least, Jim thinks, he stopped him laughing.

* * *

><p>The second person Jim burns is his father.<p>

He's sixteen now, and the old methods are still the best ones. So he uses the same trick: swapping what he thinks of as those _anti-crazy tablets_ with sleeping pills, a stronger brand than normal and twice as effective. His father is far too whacked-out to notice that the small red-and-white spheres have been replaced with cylindrical, shiny white tubes. He gulps down six of them and swigs cans of beer for the rest of the night while watching quiz show re-runs on the second-hand TV. At around three in the morning, having imbibed a good 20 units of alcohol, he passes out on the coffee table. Head down. A small puddle of drool collecting by his unshaven mouth.

He doesn't wake up again.

_(So tell me, what's it like to be you?)_

Jim hates that question.

He's fairly sure that this is the point when he realises that death isn't the terrible thing everyone else treats it as. It's just something that happens _(it's what people do)._ And if you give them a little help along the way, it doesn't really matter. After all, it's not like they'll be telling anyone, is it?

If nothing matters, he rationalises, there's nothing to save.

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><p>The third person he burns is a girl.<p>

He doesn't know her, although he can tell that she's just passed her twentieth birthday and she works as a shop assistant in some chain store and has had a drug habit since she was fifteen. He doesn't know her name, never met her before, but he can tell she's got a cat – no, two – and one is a tabby and her brother is depressed and her parents are divorced and she's recently had a serious break-up.

So much, and yet so little, and none of it matters at all.

He still can't remember what she was wearing, or what kind of drug she overdosed on, and it doesn't particularly matter; the girl herself is inconsequential. It's the manner of her dying that enthrals him. It's the way she slips toward her death as easily as if she is falling asleep. She doesn't struggle; her last breaths don't tear their way out of her throat, she doesn't spend her last few moments pawing helplessly at the dirty concrete she is dying on, struggling for purchase upon a world she is already slipping out of. No, she greets death with wide open eyes and a faint smile and it's this that makes him lean down and cover that wondering smile with his mouth and steal her last breath from her. Without that stolen breath, she might have still lived, and so he counts it anyway.

He wants to taste the nature of dying, he wants take from the world at large that precious last exhale, have it for his own. He wants to taste of death and so he does. There's a tremor through that dying body and a silent, insubstantial whisper of used air pushed out through tired lungs and a beaten mouth and he catches it in his own. It tastes of regret and suffering and loss, but not of fear and defeat, as he had thought it would.

And then there is simply another corpse in another alleyway, and Jim stops counting.

* * *

><p>It's been ten years. Ten years of distractions. Of shooting, assassinations, break-ins, mindless torture, and a hundred other banal things, dull, dull, dull. Suits. Cafés. Guns. Snipers. Terrorists. Computer codes. Striplights. Blood. Cold concrete cells.<p>

It's all just _distractions._

And then, like a bolt from the blue, what everything has been leading up to. This is it, finally. He knows it, can feel it in every particle of him, the charge, the exhilaration, the inevitable victory.

The Game is on.

* * *

><p>Moriarty is a man in a world of aliens, or perhaps it's the other way around.<p>

And everything he's done, everything he's achieved (except, when it comes down to it, has he really achieved anything?), murder, theft, arson, jaywalking, it's all been a search for one person, one man, _this_ man – an endless hunt for someone who could possibly comprehend.

_(So tell me, what's it like to be you?)_

He really, really hates that question.

It's pathetic, really. If you think about it, that is. He doesn't even need that person to like him, they just have to understand him. Because an alien is always searching for other aliens; for the light at the end of the tunnel, as it might conceivably be called. He saw a glimmer of that light in Sherlock Holmes and he chased it until the end.

Of course, the culmination happens just as he would have expected. He's laid it all out in his head beforehand, seen what would happen, the ghosts, the foreshadowing. There's only one way through. At least it was anticipated.

He opens his mouth, swallows the gun whole _(a spoonful of sugar makes the medicine go down) _and tightens one finger on the trigger. One finger. And then the bullet is like a pill, one of Jeff Hope's pills; it's death or glory, or in this case, both. A final release, freedom – and Jim dies smiling. He's died like a suicide, yes, but at least this time, it's for a cause.

He dies smiling because the last thing he has seen on Sherlock's face is horror. Shock, horror, confusion, and defeat. The defeat is the most glorious of all. The great Sherlock Holmes has finally lost, and they both know it. No more games. No more distractions. Just a checkmate, and _winner takes it all. _Sure, Irene Adler (_"the woman who beat you"_) may have come close, but this time, he was just one step ahead.

Jim Moriarty has always been good at games. _Always._ But he's even better at making things burn.


End file.
